Yuan threw himself into his training after his encounter with LaChair.

  Both his and Bucket’s attempts at gathering information or approaching their fellow contestants yielded little results so far: Orient was nowhere near the fastest vehicle in the competition, and few competitors appeared interested in an alliance besides Mel and Hardy. Rampant paranoia and the fact Yuan openly challenged the Khan’s right-hand man made many wary of him.

  And most worrying of all, they hadn’t found a single sign of Manhattan’s presence yet.

  The nuclear cultivator should be somewhere in the city. He knew that the Khan had the cube and left Fleshmarket long before Yuan’s crew. He should have arrived earlier. Yuan suspected he was likely biding his time until the victory celebration. If so, they would have to plan for his inevitable interference.

  Yuan would have to fight many powerful enemies very soon, and crossing the Fourth Coil would help with that. Moreover, it would also provide a good bargaining chip to form alliances with other racers. The stronger Yuan became, the more attractive a partner he would become in their eyes.

  Hence he decided to spend the days and nights preceding the race training nonstop. He had completed his soul sutra circuit by the second day, a swift progress that pleased Arc.

  “You’re almost there,” Arc told him once he finished. She sounded halfway enthusiastic for once. “Now comes the hard part. You’ll need to cycle nonstop until your bullet-core fully aligns with the sutra script and thus perfects the circuit. That step will permanently bind you to the Gun Path, so here’s your last chance to quit.”

  “You already know my answer,” Yuan replied with a grunt. “Will it compel me to shoot Slash on sight though?”

  “Still sulking over that?” Arc snorted. “I told you, the Gun feeds on the cycle of revenge. Your desire for payback is the very thing that fueled your resurrection.”

  “You could have told me that my bullet-core would influence me so thoroughly.”

  “You resisted the call, didn’t you?” Arc didn’t apologize in the slightest. “The Gun has no more pull than a tiny voice in the back of your mind. It strengthens what’s already in your heart. It encourages you, but the choice to pull the trigger remains your own.”

  Yuan may have stopped himself, but he would have appreciated a little forewarning. “You just have to withhold information, don’t you?”

  “Yes, because otherwise you’ll start taking straight answers for granted.” Arc’s lips twisted into a smirk of cruel amusement. “Half of a cultivator’s training is learning how to handle frustration.”

  If so, then Yuan was overqualified.

  “You’ll need to meditate without interruption until the process is complete. Any interference could prove disastrous, so you’ll have to seal yourself shut someplace until you finish or die.” Arc said the last part so absent-mindedly that Yuan nearly missed it. “The metals wagon will help by increasing the output of qi you can cycle with. With luck and perseverance, you should cross the Fourth Coil within a day’s time.”

  “A day?” A surge of pride flared within Yuan’s heart. “I’ve hardly been a cultivator for a month and you think I could cross the Fourth Coil so soon?”

  “Don’t get cocky,” Arc warned him. “You’re about to hit the Authority wall. It’s possible to blaze through the Coils beforehand—and you’re not the quickest to do so—but that step takes years to cross, if ever. Most Elders languish there for decades.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Yuan was only trying to find some joy in his progress. “I’m not going to catch up to you or Manhattan anytime soon.”

  “No,” Arc replied bluntly. “But keep working hard and you’ll eventually close the gap. No mountain is too tall for the determined to climb.”

  Something about her tone gave Yuan pause. Her words sounded like the same vague platitude every sect teacher gave their students at one point or another, but they carried a blunt kind of earnestness. He vividly recalled how Arc first dismissed him when she took him under her wing, half-expecting him to die long before he reached Manhattan.

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  Her opinion of him had changed a great amount since then. Now she believed he could eventually create his own Authority given time and effort.

  It inspired Yuan to do better.

  Arc remained silent for a few seconds and then quickly moved on. “The Gun Demon Incarnation technique works by temporarily transforming you into your spiritual reflection. Cycling constantly will force your bullet-core and body to align with your soul. To put it simply, you’ll briefly become an Infernal; a weapon-demon of gun violence.”

  Yuan scowled. “Like the Gun?”

  “Sort of,” Arc confirmed. “Your mind will remain your own, but the burst of power will feel intoxicating. Learning how to ride the high without losing control will take time. I suggest that you focus on an emotional anchor while in that state. Remind yourself of what keeps you grounded so you don’t fly off.”

  Yuan already knew exactly what to focus on. “How long will the transformation last?”

  “Until you run out of qi or cancel it,” Arc replied. “The Gun Demon Incarnation technique is a double-edged sword. It’ll grant you a burst of power, multiply your strength, and provide you with natural weapons at the cost of a future backlash. Once it ends, you’ll be unable to use techniques for a brief lapse of time as your body recovers.”

  “Only techniques?” Yuan noticed the subtility. “So you are saying I can still use feng shui and sutras afterwards?”

  “You catch on quickly,” Arc complimented him. “The more time you spend in your infernal form, the longer the technique loss will last. You’ll need to pace yourself.”

  Yuan nodded sharply, then rose up to move to the metal wagon and proceed with the exercise. He briefly stopped at the door as he recalled something.

  “What is it?” Arc asked.

  “You learned about the Perfect Shot from a Long dragon sage,” Yuan replied. “Do they still live?”

  “Yes, in a sanctuary far to the west beyond the Fanged Coast.” Arc immediately guessed his intentions. “You want him to heal the child.”

  “Yes,” Yuan confirmed. He wanted Holster to enjoy life to the fullest. “Do you think the Long would agree to it?”

  “Maybe. It would be a very long journey though, and fraught with danger.”

  “I would like you to mark the location on a map to Orient, if you don’t mind,” Yuan said. “If either of us doesn’t make it through the competition, I would like her to lead Holster to that Long for treatment.”

  “I see no issue with that.” Once again, Arc’s lips stretched into that strange smile of fondness. “I’m starting to believe I was wrong about you.”

  “In a good way?”

  She chuckled. “Yes.”

  Yuan moved into the metal wagon with a lighter heart.

  He immediately sensed the flow of ambient qi the moment he sat in the middle of the room. The very essence of refined metal, the kind that fueled his own core, suffused into every inch of the bagua array in the wagon’s center. Meditating here was akin to breathing steel and tasting pure iron.

  Yuan could feel it seep through his skin. The frontier between his sense of self and the very essence of qi grew thinner by the day. Processing it through his bullet-core hardly demanded any conscious effort on his part.

  Yuan began to cycle, a pulse of qi emerging from his core and traveling through his wafer-thin layers of circuitry. The sutras engraved into his veins formed a single formula whose near-invisible nano-inscriptions lit up one after the other as qi traveled through his body from his head to his toes and then back up to his skull. His piston-muscles and steel-flesh sang a prayer.

  Then the qi returned to his bullet-core, followed by pain.

  A sharp surge of agony erupted in his bullet-core, the same way it did back when he encountered the Gun. A visceral sensation overtook his skull, cruel and familiar: the memory of Slash’s bullet shattering his bones and worming its way into his brain.

  Yuan powered through the pain, as he did so many times before. His bullet-core unleashed another pulse of qi through the circuit, rehearsing the prayer in the span of a nanosecond. Yuan braced himself for the second round.

  Instead of his death, he experienced dozens all at once.

  He felt bullets hit his body in countless directions. The back of his skull, his stomach, his heart, his ribs, and all his body parts. He watched a firing squad of faceless soldiers load their rifles through twenty pairs of eyes and suffered as many deaths in the span of an instant.

  Yuan endured the round of cycling in spite of his confusion, but the third proved even worse. His body hit a mass grave in a forgotten jungle at the same time his fractured skull joined a pile of them.

  It was the fourth round that forced him to bite his metal tongue with his ammo teeth so as not to scream in pain. There he filled the trenches to the tune of distant bombardments, his mind watching the assault through hundreds of barrels.

  Only then did Yuan understand what engraving the Gun Path and its Bullet Hell into his core truly meant.

  It meant knowing the Bullet Hell. Learning it. Living it.

  Every part of it, all of its bloodsoaked history, all the way back to its beginning. He had to make the very concept of Gun such an inherent part of his soul that it would be there every time he closed his eyes.

  By the time Yuan reached the fifth round of cycling, the barrel of a gun had burst out of his skull.

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